All hands on deck for 4.0 Beta 4 and RC 1

We’ve been pushing really hard to get to a place where a final beta and then RC phase are appropriate for the 4.0 development cycle.

This impacts a few things:

The release date (currently scheduled for August 27, in just two short weeks).

Finalizing help and about page text, and thus string freeze (and, therefore, translators).

With the help of everybody who’s contributed to this release thus far, we’ve done a really great job with the features we’ve been working on and the overall ticket queue for this milestone. All of that said, we need your help to get the following done:

Needed to reach the final beta

#28328: Focus on editing, while editing (editor scrolling improvements). There is a comment that outlines a few things we feel need at least consideration before we consider this release-worthy. @stephdau has been working through patching – testing of patches is greatly appreciated, as are bug reports (as always).

#28842: Media Grid: Bulk selection mode. User testing and further feedback have led us to give a separate selection mode another try. @ericlewis has been doing very heavy lifting throughout the cycle on the feature. There is a patch for testing (not for commit) along with some observations on ticket. Once again, testing and UI/UX observations are very welcome. If you would like to help with patching, please let us know and we can coordinate to avoid duplicate efforts.

Needed before RC1

Commit or punt all tickets currently slated for the 4.0 milestone. Anybody can help by testing/writing patches or marking tickets for commit or punt using keywords. If you’re not sure, feel free to ask in IRC, on ticket, or just move to the next one.

Triage all tickets reported against trunk. This is especially important in the RC phase, as we need to monitor things reported against trunk for bugs introduced in the cycle, particularly regressions. Many tickets opened against trunk will apply to earlier versions – please change the version field as appropriate to reflect that. It may help to filter out anything already milestoned for 4.0 or Future Release.

QA sweeps across browsers and devices, particularly on new features and checking CSS for anything introduced that may not work in IE8 or in some cases IE7. For instance, any usages of CSS calc() need to have a fallback for IE8 and older.

If you’d like to tackle something you see here and would like a little more direction to get started, please leave a comment below or head over to #wordpress-dev in IRC. One or more core developers is likely to be around at most hours.

Finally, for today’s dev chat at 2014-08-13 20:00 UTC, let’s take a quick look at the above, note any other blockers we see, and get people assigned to tasks/tickets as we can.

One HUGE blocker for RC1 is that the translators have ZERO strings to translate yet. String freeze anyone? What so freaking hard with communication between groups? Will look really good to have an all new language packs installer with no up to date languages.